Anytime you get a giant knife stuck in your head, it’s going to be a bad day. There’s a good chance, it will be your last, but not for one hitman, well, hitwoman named Eve in Sony’s new film Angel of Death, the inaugural serial film launching their original web entertainment site, Crackle.com. Told in 12 episodes, running 7-10 minutes each, this new film is a grindhouse child spawned from a heated romp of horror, Hong-Kong action, and modern noir. It’s rapid pace and brutal violence grabs you from the beginning as details of this complex story unfolds. It succeeds in giving genre fans a fresh take on old conventions and giving one of the baddest-ass actresses the center stage. In this hybrid period of varying ways of how we get our fill of entertainment, could this be the start of future of original programming that’s unfiltered and undiluted? Time will show, but Sony’s definitely putting their best foot forward with Angel of Death.

Comic book fans will recognize film’s creator, Eisner Award-Winning comic book writer, Ed Brubaker as the man who killed Captain America. He’s written Daredevil, Iron Fist, The Authority and Catwoman. Publishing in Marvel’s Icon imprint, Criminal, and most recently Incognito are two of Brubaker’s finest comic works revitalizing the monthly format and allowing readers to experience the world of common crooks and heroes in a believable and harsh world.

Angel of Death stars action darling, Zoe Bell whose work is very familiar to many but remains a fresh face in the Hollywood. New Zealand’s answer to Michelle Yeoh was the stuntwoman on Xena: Princess Warrior and Kill Bill. Her line of work was featured in the excellent documentary, Double Dare (2004) with fellow stuntwoman Jeannie Epper. But Bell is probably best remembered playing herself as the death-defying Kiwi in Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof strapped to the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger. Her incredible action work is once again showcased here, but so is her acting as we witness her character, Eve having one major occupational hazard and the strange effects it has in her recovery.

The following is a composite of two separate one-on-one interviews done with Brubaker and Bell at Wondercon 2009 in San Francisco.

Ed, in your writing, the femme fatale has been very prominent especially recent years.

Ed Brubaker: Yeah.

They’re sexy, but deadly too. I’m always drawn in by the sexual vibe going on but then you find out there’s a lot more to this woman.

EB: What about a gay-guy-femme-fatale? That would be so cool. [laughs]

[Laughs] Perhaps for the next webisode.

EB: The next one, right? [laughs] Man-Fatale!

What draws you to this character archetype?

EB: My uncle, John Paxton, was a noir screenwriter in the 40’s and 50’s. He wrote Murder My Sweet (1944), Crossfire (1947), The Wild One (1953) amongst others and I grew up around that. I really love those noir tropes. I like playing with those clich?s because they’re there for a reason. There’s nothing original in the world anyway so you’re just trying to have fun with the version you’re doing. Archie Goodwin told me a long time ago that there’s only five stories in the world. The trick is how to tell your’s. That’s where your originality comes in. What is your vision of that scene, how do you open, what’s your closing scene what’s your way into that scene?

Now, everything I’ve read about Angel of Death prior to this conversation was crammed in that first episode.

EB: Yeah, I’m really good at giving away everything in the beginning because that’s the hook. If you don’t want to see what happens after that first episode then we failed.

By the end though, it was a clean slate because everything I knew was now out of the way and I wanted to know more.

EB: I was just introducing the story and then, bam! Knife to the head. It was funny when we were filming the scene where Zoe gets in the car with the knife in her head. I don’t know how they ended up cutting it. There was no way we could get her into the car without the top of the car hitting the knife. Well you just killed yourself. [laughs] And the hypothalamus is gone. [laughs] It’s like, you cannot move the knife.

That was the first “Oh Shit!” moment for me and it just
kept going.

ZB: A big, “Oh Shit! Moment” [laughs] Oh Goood!

Yeah this is the type of film you watch with your buddy and your jabbing him in the shoulder throughout.

EB: Yeah. We should have used a shorter knife [laughs]. I had always had it stuck in my head — no pun intended — from like 1999, a PBS series of documentaries of an ER in Austin, Texas or something. Some guy had walked into the ER after an argument with a neighbor and had been stabbed in the head with a hunting knife. He drove to the hospital by himself and walked right in and said, “I’ve got a hunting knife in my head.” They x-rayed him, gave him an MRI, they looked at him and gave him a 50/50 chance to live or die. Basically they shaved his head, strapped him down in the ER and slowly pulled the knife out as carefully as possible and luckily it missed anything important.

Wow!

EB: Yeah, he had a complete recovery. But when we looked at it more and more we discovered that in cases like this people suffer from seizures and other stuff. I always thought that would be a cool idea. What if there was a hitman who was stabbed in the fucking brain and suddenly had a conscious?

Like when Homer got that pencil stuck up his brain?

EB: Exactly, and he’s smart! [laughs]

When I saw it, I was reminded in Reservoir Dogs when Mr. Brown and is shot and is able to drive away and function for awhile until his body shuts down.

EB: Right, when he’s driving away?

Yeah.

EB: You never actually see him get shot.

True, but he was still lucid enough to be aware of the situation. So you can believe in Angel of Death that being stabbed in the skull is a possible thing once it’s in there.

EB: We found even recently two weeks ago in Scotland somewhere who got stabbed in the brain (side of the head) with a razor blade and I wanted to put it up on the website to show people that this really does happen to people. It’s not incredibly common, but common enough to have medical science behind it. When people see that shot of Zoe getting that knife pulled out, everyone’s like, [in whisper tone] “Fuck!”

ZB: I know. It makes that noise. Splecckkk!

Yeah!

ZB: The first time we all saw that sequence, we were all like, Whooaah! I think it’s because of the sound effects. Shhlckk! You’re like, “Auughh. Gag!”

In watching the early episodes, has the experience changed your own perception of how comics can be adapted to film? Films can often be too compressed and TV can be too?

EB: Expansive?

Yeah. I felt every episode at 7-10 minutes long was like a 22-page comic.

EB: That’s one of the reasons they went for me I think. They wanted to do an episodic graphic novel in film form. For me it was just an opportunity. I’ve been to Hollywood a few times on different projects, written screenplays. You know it’s almost impossible to get something made. Brian Michael Bendis has written tons of things and made tons of money in Hollywood but hasn’t had anything made yet and he’s the biggest writer in comics. When they approached me for this internet thing and Zoe was going to be involved I thought, ‘Well maybe we should come up with this concept specifically for Zoe.’ And it was greenlit before I started writing. That never happens. So to me, I get to write a feature film and it’s going to be filmed two weeks after I’m done writing it.

With the internet as an entertainment provider now. There’s a challenge going from comics which are these long episodic stories to doing the same thing where every episode had to have enough story that it made enough sense for an episode. I was thinking during writing it that there is probably more story than a typical 90 minute movie. It could easily be a 2-hour movie but it’s 90 minutes. We had to pack something cool in every episode. But it was really fun and a great challenge. It helped me write it faster because every ten to twelve pages had to be really tight before I moved onto the next one. Even though I wrote out the whole outline as Act I, II, III, Act I had to be episodes 1-4 and and so on… and figure what are the end beat. Coming from comics that was fucking easy. I do it four times a month if I’m good at my deadlines. [laughs]

Zoe, you’re starting to be in the camera more. Is this the beginning of a transition where you’ve realized physically, for your body to last, you may have to do more in front of the camera stuff.

ZB: Yeah but it’s not really for the physical reason. The acting thing’s definitely become a potential new path. It took about a year to even accept that might be what I wanted to do. I was a little hesitant about wanting to be an actor. Angel of Death kind of closed the deal for me. I gotta give this at least a really good shot because I really enjoyed the process. People are going to judge me. There’s no point in letting it affect my decisions in my life.

Well you’re never going to satisfy everybody.

ZB: No of course you’re not. Some people HATED me in Deathproof. “Zoe Bell was the most annoying thing in Deathproof. I couldn’t watch the movie, the voice was so annoying.”

Not here. While watching that scene with you strapped on the roof of that car with no safety in sigh. My friend and I whispered to each other, “Zoe Bell is fucking hot!” That scene sealed the deal.

ZB: [Laughs and claps]

In Angel of Death though, that’s some hardcore, brutal stuff that you did. The level of violence was almost startling. How did that rank with your impressive body of work?

ZB: We intended on having the fights being realistic, gritty and brutal. A couple of us felt it important to have it that way, in large because she is a female, to give credit that she’s female and legitimately kicks ass. How do I explain this without insulting female action stars? [laughs] It was important to be gritty and realistic. I did a lot of Xena and Kill Bill but the difference is when my face isn’t attached to it. You think, oh, she did some of that fight stuff, but you immediately connect it to Uma because that’s the idea. You know what I mean? So something about seeing the face of the person that’s actually doing it has an impact that’s subconsciously? it doesn’t ring true, it tweaks the audience. The fight scene though in the bathroom was one of my favorite things I’ve shot.

I’ve watched television shows where you do get in a different mindset when the action starts, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer you can tell it’s someone else doing the scenes, you’re taken out of the moment. But in Hong Kong Cinema, where many of the stars do their own stunts, or?

ZB: Can’t afford it.

As a result though, there’s something genuine about it, you’re completely sold on the character who can do these amazing things. I see that same thing in Angel of Death.

ZB: Yeah and I thought about it a bunch since Deathproof came out. That movie really had an effect where the audience had some response from watching it that even they couldn’t explain it. Obviously the sequence was scary, it was meant to be. But there was something about knowing there wasn’t a stunt double involved that on a very subconscious level the audience got it. There’s no forward rational thinking thing. On some instinctive gut reaction-level you know that person is actually in trouble. So you respond the way you do as a human not as an audience member. That’s the part I’m enjoying in Angel of Death, playing with a scene and what kind of response we can get from audiences, by letting them feel that it’s actually me. And I would love it even if it wasn’t me. I love the concept.

Catch Ed Brubaker’s latest femme fatale in live action and Zoe Bell coming into her own as an actress in Angel of Death, now showing a new episode each day at http://www.crackle.com.angelofdeath from March 1-13. It also stars Doug Jones, Lucy Lawless, Brian Poth, Ted Raimi and is directed by Paul Etheredge. The series will likely have a limited life on Sony’s Crackle.com before it is collected on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Ernie Estrella